Season's Greetings

(Please try the large view; somehow the reds look dull in the preview.)

It's a bit late, but here they are: my best wishes for the holidays :).

Every year I paint a number of cards by hand, because I know there are a few people who like getting one of my pictures. I have been doing this since I was a teen, and always integrate a character that fascinates me at that moment. I have a distinct memory - and some physical evidence, unless I am much mistaken - of drawing Gawain as one of the three kings, somewhere in the nineties. This time, I picked Morgana. That's basically because this card was done for Nout, whom I have been sending ugly wizards for years, so I thought he'd be pleased to get a picture of a beautiful nun for a change ;-).

The inks were done with brushes. I'm particularly happy with the lady's face: her skin is really luminous, and her mouth is as perfect as I'm likely to get it. The paper is Fabriano - I chose it in an attempt to attract some of Cecilia's watercolour mojo ;P. Well, I don't exactly reach Cecilian levels, but for me it's not at all bad...

Have a wonderful new year!

Kundry and Co.

I finished Der Rote Ritter. Eine Geschichte von Parzivâl (Adolf Muschg, Suhrkamp 1993) this week. I'm glad that I made it, but sad that it's over. It's a great, great novel and I only wish I could ever create a work like that. *sigh*

I'm always trying to recommend the book to people, but unfortunately it does not seem to have been translated. So unless you know enough German to read a 992-page Swiss novel, I guess you will just have to take my word for how good it is :-).

Anyway - my task now is to shake off Muschg's version of Gawain's adventures at the Castle of Maidens and to formulate my own. It is funny how I feel more or less obliged to stick to Chrétien and Wolfram's accounts of the Grail adventure. I have to remind myself that I can really deal with it any way I want. Best of all, Chrétien's story breaks off just as Gawain has survived the ordeal of the Bed of Wonders, so I can really take it anywhere from there. I can introduce Morgana in the tale if I like. I can make of the duel with Guiromelant/Gramovlanz whatever I like. It's like fanfic, but better. Hah!

Now, one effect Muschg has had on my (poor) storytelling brain is seriously to rekindle my interest in the character of Orgelûse (Chrétien's Orgueilleuse de Logres) - the lady I call Kundry (because to my mind Orgueilleuse isn't a proper name but an epithet). I have been drawing quite a bit of Kundry as a consequence.

When Gawain first sees her, she is sitting by a well under an elm tree, looking at herself in a mirror. Gawain falls in love with her on the spot. And she looks through him. Oh, she's wonderfully snarky! - In any case, I would like to do a nice picture of her in watercolour, and I have made a few quick sketches that I rather like. It will take more effort before I can turn them into a painting, but...

The version above is the first that I did; in reality it's even smaller. It was drawn with a ballpoint pen, and so is the one below:

(Click to view a larger version.)

This is another typical example of my very wrong way of going about pictures :-). I start drawing the character, and then I start to worry about their surroundings. I think the normal thing would be to draw the place where the character is supposed to be sitting, think out the composition, and then place the character in the surroundings. Me, I really only care about the character, so I finish it entirely, and then stop because I suspect I am going to ruin the picture by my ineptness at drawing surroundings :/. So she's not sitting on anything. Ah well.

I have much, much more, but no time right now to comment on it, and as they are all sketchy pictures, they need some text. So: more soon.

Morgana: a pastel

This time I tried to use my pastel pencils without a graphite outline. Instead, I did the sketch in a pale blue pastel. I'm pretty pleased with the result, even though everything is less sharp than I usually have it. But that's why they are pastels, right? :-)

I much enjoyed doing this one, and I tried to be bold and not use the felt smudging thingies (no idea what they are called, sorry!) so much.

I know her eyebrows are a bit extreme, but you will know by now that I can never resist doing extreme things with eyebrows :D. And Morgana is not supposed to look ordinary anyway.

This was fun. I'm going to do it again. Yay pastels!

Teen Gawain pastel

There, my first Gawain in multicolour :-). I did this pastel exactly one week ago, but didn't upload it earlier because I wasn't able to take a photograph of it. For some reason, pastels don't scan - or I don't manage to scan them, in any case. I was waiting for some daylight for the photograph, but all week I come home when it's already dark outside. Then yesterday the sun shone, but I forgot all about the photo X(. And today was cloudy. So I finally took a photograph with artificial light, which never looks very good. The colours here are therefore not as they should be... I'll try to do better :-).

I don't seem to manage to use pastels like pastels, do I? I always try to make them smooth... I can't help it: I just like detail :P. So I always do a pencil picture first, and then colour it. I always go back with my pencil to make the lines sharper, too...

Project: Gawain (continued)

Morgana, straight from the draft of a brochure :D. This pencil sketch is tiny, but I like it very much. It determined Morgana's general look for me, and I guess it contributed to my determination to make her a nun *g*. I have discovered that I enjoy drawing veils and capes, and that they can be very flattering :).

I'm still debating whether I'll call this gentleman Myrddin or Merlin. I am rather partial to Myrddin, but there seems little point in using this Welsh name if I don't have Welsh names for each character in the story :/. It has crossed my mind to simply rename the more "classic" medieval characters, but then I remembered how much I as a reader like to find familiar names in my Round Table books...

Hm.

Still pondering the matter.

Happy with this Morgana, by the way :).





Two Gawains.

I'm very fond of his nose, it's going to be cutesy ;).

In fact it rather looks like my Ambiorix's.

With and without beard. Think black hair on the beardless Gawain's head to see the alternative version of Medraut/Mordred.

I'm trying to draw my heads smaller ever since Cecilia made a remark to me about the size of the head in proportion to the body, but I have to confess that when I draw them closer to their "real" size, they always look too small to me. Maybe that is because I have a large head and narrow shoulders myself...?

A tiny sketchie, just to get some idea about my hero's build. Of course stuff is wrong with it :P. I haven't started seriously studying anatomy yet (I should start with arms and hands, methinks), so I'm sort of trying out how far I get on my own. I know I would be better of really studying, but I haven't got the energy in weekends. Basically I need to SLEEP as much as possible, and to relax. Since I get worked up about my pictures' shortcomings, studying anatomy is *not* relaxing :/. So I keep putting it off. But I'll get to it. Seriously.

A few characters

Below are a few characters in random order. They are not final yet - these are mostly the first sketches I have done of them and liable to change. Most look a bit clumsy. Of several characters I have in the meantime done better pictures, but I haven't got round to scanning them yet. Will do when I have time :).

This sketch of Morgause, Gawain's mother, looks very much like the Morgauses I used to draw when I was fifteen. (I remember doing a comic for my bestest friend in which a similar Morgause complained to Morgana about an unfair decision during an international football game of the Belgian national team. Don't ask.)

Her hair is supposed to be black, though I did not bother to colour it here. Her eyes are blue. She has changed a bit in the meantime, but the general idea is: petite, pretty, otherworldy - and cold.

Morgause's younger sister, Morgana. I have considered spelling her name as Morgain(e), because it would look nice next to Gawain and Owain, but it reminds me too much of Mists of Avalon, and I positively detested that book.

Because I am always contrary and got very tired of the whole Morgana-as-a-priestess-of-the-Goddess ado that is so very popular, I decided to go with the one book I ever read (I don't even remember which it was) that says Morgana was actually an abbess. Hah! She makes one cool nun, I tell you ;D.

Two archenemies: King Pellinore and King Lot. I have this idea that Pellinore is Scandinavian - I got that into my head after I realised that his name has the same ending as Elsinore, Hamlet's castle, which is an Anglicised form of Helsingør. So I started thinking of Pellinore as Pellingør. Again, don't ask :-).

Pellinore, contrary to popular belief, is a pig. It annoys me that he is usually painted as good and noble when one of the first things we hear about him in Arthurian lore is that he is a rapist. Blergh. BAD pig.

Lot is a pig too. Ask Morgause. He amuses Morgana, though, so he is slightly better than Pellinore. That, and I'm biased because he dotes on his sons.

A tiny picture from the margins of one of my brochures: Cai. He has very long brown hair, a very long brown 'stache and a long brown beard :-). Oh, and cool eyebrows that he hasn't got here yet... Ah well. I want him to have all the strange powers he has in ancient Welsh texts, so count on him being able to keep his breath for three days, grow as tall as a forest tree, and have a high enough body temperature to be used as a stove by his mates in winter XD.

I see we have arrived at Gawain's three wives. Yay! I like them all very much - not these sketches, really, but the characters behind them :-).

This is Ragnell, Wife the First. When she married Gawain, she looked - not very good. In fact she looked her real age, which is ... a few hundred years? Fortunately the kiss of a handsome prince can work miracle, at least in fairytales.

She is a fay, and Gawain loves her to bits. Unfortunately, she dies ;_;.

Ragnell is the mother of Gawain's eldest son, Cillian.

Wife Number Two is called Rhonwen. Her father threw a spear at Gawain as soon as he set eyes on him. He's a giant, incidentally. How he begot Rhonwen on her normal-sized mother I just don't want to know. I think it's called poetic licence, or something of the kind. In any case, Rhonwen is a fay too, and lives with her mother and father in a fairy hill until Gawain comes along.

Rhonwen's daddy is known as the Carl of Carlisle. His name is *not* Carl ;P.




This is Kundry. She is bad-tempered and sarcastic, and sets a record for keeping Gawain dangling. But as she takes the place of Third Wife, you know the dangling doesn't last forever. Gawain cannot perhaps convince her that he is the best and most interesting man around, but Kundry does end up believing that he might just be good enough for her. Of course *nobody* understands what he sees in her because - well, she's really not nice. And she never smiles. Or at least not in public.

Obviously she's my favourite :P.

And here he is: the bad guy.

I'm sorry. He is really bad. I haven't found a single redeeming virtue in Medraut yet. That is a bit frightening.

I really like how he looks here. Nevertheless I am seriously considering making him a black-haired version of Gawain, to posit them as clear opposites. I'm thinking it over.

Gawain looks very ... Asian here. It's not just me, is it? Clearly I have to sort the funny fay eyes out before I can get down to the serious work :). Maybe I have been reading too much Tsubasa lately *g*.

Apart from that, his looks are pretty stable now.

More next time - I have a few pretty Morganas on the shelf...

Sketchdump

Look, piccies!

I have been trying for, what, two weeks to write a decent post about my chouchou Gawain and the project as a whole, but I don't seem to be able to manage without getting very long-winded and giving away every single plot point I would like to use XD. So I have a few pages stored on my hard drive that I just can't post... Ah well. I *will* post something on the characters, an introduction, and also the sketches I have done so far. There's a bit of story in there, but nothing major, just loose little ideas.

Below are some - very quickly - inked sketches. The first I'm including especially for Nout, who found it amusing because he discovered a parallel between my 'serious' version of Gawain, and Kaamelott's hilarious Gauvain. Gauvain is a complete loser who constantly makes a fool of himself - possibly even more so than the other characters in the series, and that's saying something :P. The saddest thing is that he really means well. So when Arthur once again loses his temper about one of his nephew's amazing stupidities, Gauvain tends to react with a disappointed, "Mais, mon oncle..." In fact, the 'serious' Gawain, too, has an impressive number of truly embarrassing adventures, the poor darling. The difference is that he manages to remain quite heroic all the way through. *g*

I did a number of sketches on the train, mainly to exercise in drawing King Lot, because I was enjoying his character so much. Unfortunately the sketches all turned out to be amazingly bad. Yesterday, thinking I had nothing to lose, I decided to take my Faber-Castell pens to them and try if there was anything I could salvage by inking. The result isn't brilliant, but it's certainly an improvement :D.

Lot, Lot, Lot - except for, top right, one Gawain drawn directly in ink. I'm doing a lot of Gawain pictures these days to figure out his built. He's supposed to be muscular and yet slender - I don't find that easy :/. I keep trying though.

The middle one is Gawain; apart from that, Lot and Morgana. You'll notice that Gawain and Morgana have strange eyes - I use the eyes to distinguish between humans and (part-) fays.

More later!

Arthuriana

Just throwing a few pictures at you... I have been doing too many Arthurian sketches to put in one post, so I'm giving you the more finished ones to get a taste for my new project ;-). The others require some text, because they are mostly character studies. Have these first, in a quick post :-).

(...if you needed more proof that I'm bad at drawing kiddies...)

(Making a mess with watercolour, YAY! This is SO not thought out... *g*)

(Happy with my inking. This is done with a brown Faber-Castell PITT pen.)

(My new favourite couple :P... It's Lot and Morgana!)

Veridicus!

I have once again not been able to do any of the things I *wanted* to do this evening, but I don't want to wait any longer to share this:

Veridicus, all coloured!

Nout, a.k.a. the Comics Expert, gave me the little gem on Saturday. It seems that he keeps putting subtle (?) pressure on a real colour artist to make my lines look a bit more presentable... The great colours gracing my modest pencils are the work of Bartel Bruneel, whose art you can find on his blogspot Willborough, and the same artist who did the colours on Comm here.

Thanks a million, Bartel :D! This is absolutely wonderful - Veridicus looks alive! It's incredible how this colour art gives him substance. In my picture he was simply flat. I would never have believed that he could look so real, and the skin tones and facial muscles are gorgeous...

*swoons*

I told you, didn't I, that Veridicus was handsome? Well, you have the proof now! :P

la la la lalala la la la la lala lala la la la la laaaaaaaaaaa...

G'night!

Gawain Again

I am not sure how it happened, but I have suddenly found Gawain again. Between the ages of fourteen and eighteen, I was absolutely obsessed with this one knight of the Round Table. I thought Lancelot was a bore - he didn't seem to have a sense of humour, and he was universally acknowledged as The Greatest Knight of All. Blah.

Now Gawain, he is quite different. Somehow he gets into the strangest adventures of all, usually involving a wide array of ladies (young, old, seductive, distant, pretty, ugly, lethal, protective, possessed of magical powers or not) and really weird opponents, like green blokes on green horses or even the devil himself. He is at once the most courteous and considerate, as well as the most savage of King Arthur's knights. That is, he does not anger easily and never seems eager to fight; but when he gets into a rage he seems to lose control entirely, much in the way of ancient Irish heroes like Cúchúlain. He also has a kind of superpower: his strength waxes and wanes with the sun. This is a striking thing, because it shows clearly that his origins are more ancient than those of most other knights in the medieval romances. His ambiguity of character also shows in the fact that though in British romances (the notable exception being Malory's Morte Darthur) he is always a hero, while in French romances he is either used in contrast to the central hero of the story (mostly Lancelot and Percival) and portrayed as not living up to their standard, or he is simply a villain and a thug. I can't think of any other characters in medieval Round Table stories who serve both purposes.

When I was fifteen I started to write my own Gawain trilogy - yes, even then I never settled for small projects ;-). I actually made it through the entire first book, and with characteristic naïvité showed it to a teacher, who told me I should try to get it published. I did try, twice. Of course the manuscript was rejected, and when I look at it now, it is obvious why XD - so obvious, in fact, that I'm rather relieved that nobody can produce a copy and confront me with it... But, well, I was only fifteen after all. The great thing was that one of the publisher's professional readers, an author of young adult books himself, invited me to his home to give me tips about writing. I am still grateful for that, because even though I lost courage after the two rejections and stopped in the middle of my second Gawain novel, it dawned on me much later that this writer thought I had it in me to write a good novel one day. The novel is still not written, and my attention has for a large part shifted towards comics, but his encouragement has strengthened my belief in my capacity to tell a story - a capacity that I do my best to hone, even if, like everything else, it takes me a lot of time.

Now, why did I start about Gawain again? It is just that a few pieces about his character fell into place, like that, out of the blue. It crossed my mind that, unlike with my Gauls, Gawain might actually furnish material for short comics. That means that I could take on something that can be finished within a limited timeframe. Also positive is that the settings would be rather similar to the ones I need to picture Gaul, and so these short stories could provide good exercise. I already have a lot of material in terms of plot. And a new version of Gawain just found its way to paper, so...

Here are the first sketches, mostly in bic pen. I wanted to try drawing with bics because I see that lots of artists do it, with great results, even though the medium never really attracted me. Trying it out has warmed me to it, though I'm not really projecting any finished pictures in it.